Swing Time

Swing Time

How do we become who we are?Can we ever truly escape our origins?Must we dance to the music of our time?Set in London, New York and West Africa, Swing Timeis about two brown girls from Willesden who dream of being dancers. Only one - Tracey - has the talent. But the other has ideas which take her further than she could ever have imagined. It is a story of finding happiness in the meanest of places and feeling sad when all around you are happy. It's about the choices we make and the choices made for us. Above all, it's a tale of the friendships that anchor us, define us, and change us forever.

Awards

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2017

Reviews

'Brilliant' --Guardian 'Superb' --Financial Times 'Virtuosic and breathtaking' --Times Literary Supplement 'There is still no better chronicler of the modern British family than Zadie Smith' --Telegraph

Endlessly satisfying... [Zadie Smith] has never written better. Pitch-perfect, masterful and sophisticated Telegraph

Zadie Smith is the best writer of our generation, and Swing Time is her best book to date. As the title promises, the novel swings and pulsates with life, filled with emotion, excited by intellect and haunted by sadness. What a miracle that literature can still do things other forms of art cannot. What a miracle that Zadie Smith is among us, writing. -- Gary Shteyngart

Clever, funny, confident and kind. Her gift for language is a pleasure and her character shines through-- Evening Standard

[Smith] packs more intelligence, humour and sheer energy into any given scene than anyone else of her generation --Sunday Telegraph

Zadie Smith's finest novel. Extraordinary, virtuosic... [It] does what only literature can and what only great literature will: forces us to assess the very vocabulary with which we speak of human experience --Observer

Ingenious, inspired... Zadie Smith's new novel is very good indeed --Sunday Times

Shrewd observation and sly satire, profundity and genuine purpose, as well as some of the most heart-stoppingly lyrical writing of her career --Scotland on Sunday

A powerful story of lives marred by secrets, unfulfilled potential, the unjustness of the world...and the dances people do to rise above it all --Economist

A sweeping meditation on race and identity... [Smith's] most ambitious work yet Esquire A nuanced, richly rewarding tale --Mail on Sunday

Author description

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty and NW, as well as The Embassy of Cambodia and a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists. She has won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award among many others, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith lives in London and New York with her husband and two children. Swing Time is her fifth novel.